Flurry courts mobile developers with free crash reporting tool

As a way to sweeten its mobile analytics product, Flurry Analytics is adding two more services to help mobile developers gauge how they’re attracting new users and how often their app crashes — and it’s adding those features for free.

Both iOS and Android developers can use the Flurry SDK and will have access to new User Acquisition analytics and Crash Reporting analytics. The User Acquisition feature is available starting Friday, the crash reporting tool will be available for Android developers on Friday (in beta form) and for iOS users sometime later this month. Currently there are 95,000 SDK users.

Measuring the effectiveness of in-app ad campaigns will be useful for developers who want to understand user behavior. The crash reporting tool was added because developers want and need it: It was the No. 1 most requested feature when Flurry polled its users at the end of 2012.

By giving away this feature, Flurry can hope to attract more developers away from other services, like Bugsense (which also works with Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 apps) and Crittercism (which also does HTML 5 apps) which offer basic free service, but charge for premium services. Another potential competitor, Crashlytics, was just scooped up in an acquisition by Twitter this week, to help that service work on improving Twitter’s mobile app performance.